Another map for www.booksofgrimm.com/ The Books of Grimm. Go to his site to see the full sized version, if you'd like, and learn more about the fantasy world this map covers.

As this is a commission, please don't snatch it. I'm very open-source and have plenty of FREEEE map resources for you and your maplust, so go and steal those instead. Brushes! A huge tutorial on how exactly I do maps! Textures! The huge pack even has a FONT. You have no excuse, basically any joe can make a map with this. calthyechild.deviantart.com/ar… Plus, I do very generously low priced map commissions. You can get your own map! For cheap! Paul is pretty convinced he's robbing the cradle and eventually I'm going to realize what my work is worth, so get in on the cheap maps while you still can, I guess!

Thanks. This is hardly my best work. I haven't updated my portfolio in some time. I've gotten better since this (though this was what I considered to be my best work later last year... doing a lot of maps forces you to always improve!) and I really ought to post some of them. Here, have a look at one of my newer ones, from earlier this year. www.dropbox.com/s/zmd5glekoqa3…

The dotted line for the roads was made by setting a basic circle brush to a hard setting, no tablet pressure sensitivity, and then adjusting the spacing so that it would make dots. Yes, in Photoshop.

The goal with mountains is not to stamp them on but to integrate them into the land. I often do my text first and work things around them, to avoid having to make glowing text. So you start with the most important, major things, and then work smaller and smaller to use tiny details to blend the big things in. Hills to gradiate the mountains, trees, bushes, finally grass. I've made tons of brushes that are just little bits of 'land', cracked or rocky or prairie to create variety in the terrain. And tons of mountains.

You can ask questions about my secrets any time, I happily share instructions. I should find my first map for you, lol, yours is so much better, yours looks like a legit fantasy map. My originals, they were all hand drawn and basically illegible.

Hard? No. Time-consuming and a little nitpicky at worst. Snoop in my gallery, I have a tutorial for how I started off making maps. The tutorial comes with a massive brush set, fonts (including map glyph font for non-Photoshop users), textures, and all of the things you need to get started making maps the way I do. I use basically the same strategy these days. Heck, I even use some of the resources from that tutorial in my map commissions, as well as another massive set I created that I haven't released yet.

Basically, learning placement and how to make things look good and natural is very much a learning process that comes with practice and a good eye for arrangement. I always set up all of the land and rivers first, before approaching anything else. Then, I put any text down... if you looked through my maps the Carmen map is a good example of what I'd start off with before doing glyphs. I never did do full land details for that map, just the land and water and text. Knowing where all the text is going to be is half of the battle. With one caveat; I don't put down text to say, name a mountain range until I've placed the mountains, since I want the text to curve around the range. Same with roads; I'll draw the road first and then place the text. But for forests, knowing where the text is going to be is a huge help. If there's going to be say, a city in the forest that's illustrated, I'll place the little city illustration before doing the trees. Always work from biggest to smallest. Things like forests should thin out to much smaller trees. The tiny scattered trees, and little bits of land texture I think really help to keep it from looking too cluttered.

So. Land/water first. Text next (unless it's going to curve around an element). Then mountains and hills, because they're big. If you're doing symbols for cities, place them, and if you're doing illustrated tiny cities, definitely place them now. Then do the roads, and any text labels that need to curve. Then do the bigger 'insides' of the forests, which should thin out to small individual trees around the text and edges. Same approach for any deserts/jungles/grasslands/swamp. Any big clumps, thin them out to much smaller pieces.

If it looks too busy, erase bits until it looks right. If you think it looks too empty, this is where you grab your tiny texture brushes, like the individual grass clumps/rocks/etc and add some texture, or freehand in cracks, little hills, valleys, that kind of thing. If you think stuff looks too 'stamped', freehand in details so it doesn't look repetitive. The stamps ought to be a base rather than the be all to end all.

Always work big to small, basically, and always have smaller stuff to break up the big stuff, don't just stamp.

My early maps were not this good. For example, even my tutorial map is AWFUL. I just kinda rushed it to show the basic technique! I'm wayy better now.

Well, Paul (the Amron map commissioner) is actually in the process of writing his stories and is using the maps as a visual aid for his writing process. So, maybe having a map would give you some inspiration to go at it?